What's for Dinner?

This is Pho.

I haven't spoken about the Vietnamese food much and I suppose I should since I'm eating so much of it! To begin with, you can't walk too far in HCMC without coming upon a Pho diner. Pho seems to be the national food of Vietnam. What is pho you ask? Pho (pronounced 'fir') is noodle soup with broth. But not just noodle soup. It's Vietnamese noodles and you can buy it with beef strips or vegetables or I think it sometimes comes only with noodles, broth and green onions. A large bowl only costs about 25 dong.

One of many meat dishes.  But I've never seen it with noodles!

After pho, the most common type of diner is that which sells a variety of dishes. Many times the vendor will have a glass cart outside the restaurant which displays what's for sell. On it, there might 4 dishes or 10. Usually there's a fish option, chicken option, beef option, omelet option, and pork option. If you're Vietnamese, you take a seat at a table, and when one of the servers comes over, you tell them what you want. If you're a foreigner who can't speak the language, you just point, smile and then take a seat. Once served, the meat dish always comes with a large portion of clumpy rice. (The clumpy rice is suggested for easier use with chopsticks.) The better vendors will also include a few slices of cucumber, tomato and maybe lettuce along with a small bowl of soup. The soup is never hot; warm if you're lucky.

Vietnamese baguette sandwich

After the pho and meat cart vendors, there's all the other food. One of the more common things to find are vendors who make baguette sandwiches. You can choose between some kind of meat that looks like turkey or something that I've been shown is fish. They don't usually spread mayonnaise on the sliced bread, but pate on one side and some kind of sweet mayonnaise that looks like pudding, on the other. Then you get a few slices of meat/fish, bean sprouts, onions, tomatoes and of course, the all important chili pepper slices. Unless of course you're me. Then you tell them, "Khong, khong, khong!" Some of the smaller cart vendors sell chicken legs with pasta or rice. And in the southern region of Vietnam (I never saw it in Hanoi), there's a hand food which looks like a dessert, but it isn't. It's a large meatball inside of a white dough. The dough is cooked even though it doesn't look like it. 
 

Vietnamese spring rolls

If soup, meat or sandwiches aren't your thing, it's pretty easy to find seafood vendors on the street, especially for dinner. Large baskets of various fish, clams and other recently deceased seafood items are on display for your choosing. Give your order to the vendor, and they'll cook it up.

If you're looking for ethnic food, you can find all kinds in the tourist/backpacker zone of HCMC. Indian food, Thai food, American food, Italian food and even Turkish/Greek kebobs! I'm not sure how common it is to find ethnic foreign food outside of the center of town.

With all street vendors and feet touching, nearby rat holes, and sometimes not the best (or even better) sanitation, one has to wonder how it is that the tourists don't get seriously ill eating on the street. It doesn't seem to be a topic much talked about on the tourist websites (unlike when you decide to visit Latin America), and I haven't heard of anyone getting seriously ill. So somehow it's something that doesn't need to be worried about too much. At least not until you do need to go to the hospital quickly.